[SGVLUG] IMAP notifiers

David Lawyer dave at lafn.org
Fri Oct 28 14:42:55 PDT 2005


On Fri, Oct 28, 2005 at 11:10:34AM -0700, Claude Felizardo wrote:
> What do people use for email notifiers on Linux?

I never bothered to do anything about email notification, but I seem
to get notified a lot anyway.  The login program (and some other
programs such as web browsers) notify me of email with "You have new
mail".  I really don't like to see this and usually pay no attention
to it since I have over 1000 unread emails on my PC.  Also, attempts
are made to send me about 1000 spams per day (most of which get
filtered out by my ISP but about 1% get thru which I submit to my ISP
in an sometimes-successful (but usually not) attempt to punish
spammers who dared send me spam.

I just checked and found that the bash shell will periodically check
for mail if MAILCHECK is set.

I guess the way these work is to check my MAIL env. variable for the
path of my incoming mailbox: /var/mail/dave and then check it for new
mail.  I guess it doesn't concern itself with how it got there (by
fetchmail using pop3 or imap, and then by exim4).  I don't need to
monitor any server since when I'm online, fetchmail runs and tries to
fetchmail from the server at my ISP every several minutes.

> At home on my windoze box, I use the netscape/mozilla notifier which
> sits in the task bar and it just works, letting me know when I have
> email in any of my accounts, either POP3 or IMAPs.   At work, when I
> was on a Solaris box I'd just run newmail in the same console window
> that was tailing /var/log/messages and have it monitor my /var/mail
> folder and that was sufficient.  But now I'm on a Linux box that can't
> mount my mail files plus I want to monitor a few other imap servers.

I found a long list of email notifiers on the Internet but failed to
save the url.

			David Lawyer


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